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An anonymous reader writes "Adobe has released its Flash to HTML 5 conversion tool, codenamed 'Wallaby.' Wallaby is an application to convert Adobe Flash Professional CS5 files (.FLA) to HTML5 and its primary design goals were to get the best quality and performance on browsers within iOS devices like iPhone and iPad."

Only time will tell, in terms of Adobe's specific implementation; but given that Flash consists of Actionscript(practically Javascript), bitmap and vector graphics(canvas/SVG), A/V decode support for specific codecs(HTML5 video), and flash cookies/data storage(HTML5 local data store), there is no broad reason to expect that HTML5(at least in the medium term) shouldn't be able to do the majority of Flash stuff(omitting specific cases like some special streaming capabilities and DRM) with efficiency on roughly the same order as Flash(better if the browser maker is more competent/platform integrated than Adobe, worse if they are less competent, or if Adobe's conversion tool produces pathological code)...

Unfortunately, drawing lots and lots of fancy vectors with an interpreted language is always going to be more computationally expensive than more... restrained... tastes in web design; but at least it won't all be crammed into a proprietary runtime with a ghastly security record...

...this initial version of Wallaby offers no support for conversion of ActionScript, Movies and Sound.

Personally, the main utility that I could use would be a (free) method of converting.swf into just about any other video format so I can watch my online lecture courses outside of the browser (and at 1.25 fractional speed). I understand the technical benefits for using a shockwave video (e.g. file size), but there's something to be said for avoiding closed sources in an academic setting. S

You still need the Adobe plugin(unless Gnash just happens to support your specific.swf files); but VLC has support for treating the contents of the screen as an input stream, which should allow you to do an ugly-but-functional transcode... There is another cute utility that emulates a VNC client; but, instead of doing the usual VNC client thing, writes out an flv movie of the on-screen action (vnc2flv, I think is the name). If you install a VNC server on the machine being used to show the swf, you could al

A lot of legacy or 'copy-protected'(RTMPE) stuff is; but a fair amount these days is done with just a.swf container providing a few playback control widgets and pulling an.flv or.mp4 video from a URL. Most RTMP servers cost money, while bulk HTTP serving commands virtually no premium over the cost of hardware, power, and bandwidth. No assurances; but often worth a quick look at the page source or a packet sniff...

Adobe is setting up HTML5 to be "flash-lite". Like the embrace and extend concept, they can offer more features leading people genetly away from HTML5. For example, you want to build a website but are not sure what the future holds. You could build it in HTML5 and then hope you don't get stuck with some content protection or interaction issues that demand HTML5. (e.g. maybe you think your social networking ite might someday offer simultaneous feature movie viewing that will demand FLASH DRM or something

OTOH, Adobe makes their money from selling Flash authoring tools. I'm sure they couldn't give a crap less what the target format for their tools is, if people still buy their authoring tools. Being able to dump the expense of maintaining and distributing the Flash player, but still selling authoring tools that output HTML5 and let Flash slowly die? Sounds like a damn good business decision.

Adobe makes money on the editor, not the player. If they can get people to develop pages in Flash and "sidegrade" to HTML5 that's fine by them as long as they are the first and forefront of rich HTML content development suites.

ActionScript is practically JavaScript? Good god, that's like saying VB is practically C.

If I've got my version numbers right....

ActionScript 1 was an implementation of ECMAScript - i.e. the language was virtually identical to Javascript.

ActionScript 2 diverged from Javascript in that it included some elements that were being discussed for the next version of ECMAScript but never materialised (e.g. class-based OOP).

ActionScript 3 diverged a bit more (e.g. package-management stuff).

...AFAIK most of this was just "syntactic sugar" so, e.g. you can declare a class Java-style rather than creating a function and appending methods to its prototype JS-style. So cross-compiling ActionScript to Javascript should be mainly a job of translating shortcuts added in AS2&3 back into "longhand"

Of course, that's just the language - the Flash API is nothing like HTML DOM, but SVG seems a fairly good substitute for Flash's vector graphics. Pity that, unlike Apple, Android disabled SVG in their web browser (people forget that when they're ragging on iOS for not having Flash...):-(

The real issue is that neither SVG nor Canvas allow for truly interactive User Interface. Flash's graphics are inherently OOP, allowing for very simple and easy mouse interactivity. With Canvas/SVG, you have to maintain a separate map of where everything is, then when a click comes in, you have to manually do the click detection.

Obviously, this is entirely possible to replicate, but as ECMA4 (the intended 'new' standard that AS3 implemented) was thrown away for being too complicated for Web Developers, it

Since there is competition however in the browser market, much will be done to improve rendering speed of complex and heavy HTML5 applications. This is in sharp contrast with Adobe, who as sole provider of the Flash plugin has no incentive at all to improve things.

Since there is competition however in the browser market, much will be done to improve rendering speed of complex and heavy HTML5 applications. This is in sharp contrast with Adobe, who as sole provider of the Flash plugin has no incentive at all to improve things.

Sure they do. If Adobe doesn't improve Flash, then there's no reason for Flash designers to buy new versions.

Considering that Flash Professional CS5 has a list price of $699 per copy on its own.

You're confusing two different issues. Adobe has an incentive to add new features to the Flash authoring tools, much less incentive to improve the plugin: it doesn't directly generate revenue and it's got no competition.

If HTML5 support matures a bit more, Flash Professional will probably evolve into an HTML 5 rich content authoring platform. This is great from Adobe's perspective - they get to keep the profitable bit (the authoring tool) and let other companies absorb develop their their loss leader.

Flash Player is currently a strange beast. It has some amazing technology (the JIT compiler is pretty impressive), and some really hideous legacy stuff (like doing colour space transforms and compositing entirely on the CPU, because that made sense 15 years ago) that cripples performance. There's no incentive for Adobe to rewrite the legacy parts that are 'good enough', but if Mozilla's canvas implementation is significantly slower than the one in IE or WebKit then they lose marketing points so they have a strong incentive to improve it.

They're moving more compositing over to the GPU, with the addition of StageVideo and soon, MoleHill 3D API.

They had every reason and incentive to improve the compositing, etc, however some unnamed OperatingSystemXs would not let them have access to the GPU pipeline. Now that they have, Adobe has made a very strong movement towards using it as much as possible. And towards being as open about the new and upcoming tech as a corporation is likely to be.

They had every reason and incentive to improve the compositing, etc, however some unnamed OperatingSystemXs would not let them have access to the GPU pipeline

Bullshit. The APIs that they demanded are only needed if you want to do the video decoding on the GPU, then get the image out, do the colour space conversion and compositing in software, and then shove it back. OS X has had support for rendering video output to OpenGL textures or to CoreAnimation layers (both of which do hardware accelerated compositing, and can do colour space transforms on the GPU using CoreImage filters or GLSL / OpenCL shaders) for several years. APIs for achieving the effect that Ad

No, I would say it's much more likely to produce code that looks and works differently in every browser (and browser version). It's going to be just like HTML--with developers having to test the code in every different browser and working extra hours to create code that at least looks passable in each browser type and version. Hello headaches.

You're suggesting that Adobe hasn't 'improved things', when in fact, they've been releasing new versions faster than ever before. 10.2 was just recently released, with support for 'StageVideo', allowing HD movies to be rendered via the graphics pipeline, giving native performance because it uses your hardware.

They improved their cursor support, hooking into the OS to provide 'native' cursors, rather than just drawing them in Flash.

IE rendering speed was increased by 33% due to new hooks into their 'native'

Just because they've started to release updates lately now that actual competition is starting to emerge, doesn't mean I can't fault them for creating the current mess to begin with. I don't know if you have ever used the Flash plugin on Linux or Mac OS X, but the performance is terrible compared to Windows, not to mention the stability and security problems.

I suppose only time will tell. At least with HTML5 a lot more work has been done with optimizing the engines, but we still aren't immune to the endless "for" loops that take up all the CPU - maybe that would take some code that would detect a CPU crushing "for" loop and de-prioritise the code? Either way I would be curious to see how much they decide to optimise the generated code. I don't want to see something akin to the mess generated by programs such as "MS FrontPage".

I wonder how efficient this is going to be. We don't want HTML5 to get a bunch of autogenerated bogged down code and become the next flash (performance wise, anyway).

The answer to that is "probably less efficient than just running flash". Now you potentially have 4 or 5 JS scripts on timers all in contention on the same thread of your browser, all screaming to be updated every 1/30th of a second.

Well, TFA states that it isn't intended to produce "final form HTML ready for deployment to web pages". It looks like it's more of a tool to convert animation sequences and things like that.

Say what you will about Adobe, but I've always been impressed by their efforts to make their products as cross-platform ready as humanly possible, and much more so than almost any other company out there in a similar type of market.

Unless you explain why you think his post is dumb/dumber or dumbest, you are just trolling. What exactly do you think is so dumb about what he wrote? Did he get a fact about how the technology works wrong or do you disagree with his analysis of how businesses and the marketplace really work? Or maybe his conclusion conflicts with what you'd like to believe?

Of course I did not RTFA, however is there any way this technology could be used to convert flash-heavy websites to HTML5, thus benefiting those platforms which don't have a flash plugin available?
Linux/PPC comes to mind, but I am sure there are others.
And no, Gnash and company do not even come close.

Great suggestion! Have you ever tried it? A colleague and I were looking at Smokescreen and some other similar projects when we wanted to an old page with some Flash for a client working on the iPad.

Smokescreen looks fantastic in their demos, but they don't make it available for download anywhere and the last update to their site was nearly a year ago. This was a post "weeks" before they get the source code out. Hopefully eventually it is out eventually because it seems like a great project.

Not really, at least currently. There is no actionscript support, so this is really only for animation exclusive flash files. Obviously you could modify the code it generates and use that as a basis to convert your flash application, but it would basically mean maintaining your code base in two, admittedly similar, languages. This is really aimed at the animation only crowd who have little to no interactivity (ie, advertisers) and keeping them happy on the flash platform.

So is this the best of both worlds for all of us? Adobe can still sell Flash authoring software, while the need for their buggy plugin fades away. End users benefit from portability and (given Adobe's track record with the plugin) security perspective. There must be a catch.

There is a simple catch: performance. Some parts of Flash are really highly optimized (like the vector rendering engine - yup, that was once the primary purpose of the whole beast...). I highly doubt that any potential HTML5 counterpart to these parts reaches even remotely the same performance. End result: choppy animation, poor battery life, you name it.

Why wouldn't browsers be capable of the same level of performance in rendering vector graphics as Flash? Especially since hardware acceleration is already implemented by most browsers on most platforms and Javascript engines are already highly optimized, creating smoother canvas / SVG animations could well be the next big thing browser developers will aim for.

"aim for" - Sure. But today, the race is on to keep people developing in Flash and porting it to HTML5 for Adobe. They've put their foot in the door. How many browsers are working on fast SVG? I hear more about JavaScript performance that I have about SVG in any form. SVG is still very much in an infant stage on the browsers. Yes, there is some support, but it's limited.

But as more content will be provided in SVG, the support for it in browsers will also improve. It's a chicken/egg situation, I know, but I see absolutely no reason why Adobe would be the sole provider of fast rendering vector graphics on the web.

Not the sole provider really, but they are the only ones that have an editor that I'm aware of that allows for animated SVG. They are merely making sure that Adobe is the name you go to for the time being to develop said content. Drawing SVG by hand (in code) is not fun.;)

If they don't improve that software, they are no better off than Microsoft was with IE. It's defacto right now, but if they don't stay up with the latest standards they'll be replaced.

If the output is naive (i.e. uses the canvas tag to draw individual pixels), you'll have the problems you're worried about. If it makes good use of sprites, SVG, and even WebGL it has a much better chance of performing well. And even if the first version of the HTML5 output is naive, one can hope that Adobe will be responsive to the complaints of their paying customers (i.e. those who actually buy this authoring tool) and improve upon it.

You must be new here. Adobe has come out publicly and said that HTML5 doesn't scare them because they know their plugin does not have much of a future. They want to sell authoring software, that is their entire business model. As far as Apple is concerned I don't think they really care what SJ has to say one way or another.

So HTML 5 is as powerful as Flash? I always imagined Silverlight dying with HTML 5 - but I always thought Flash had something extra above HTML 5. Talking about actionscript mostly and not about the animation.

Actionscript is neat and all, but javascript is a decent replacement for it. Javascript just has a bad name because so many amateurs use it poorly, and it is a slightly different paradigm (functional, prototype-based) than traditional c++/java/VB that professionals are used to. Its proper use has come a long way in the past few years though.

I've been looking, and while I've seen a few bloggers back up my story, I haven't been able to find an article I read last year, which quoted them as saying such.

and it is a slightly different paradigm (functional, prototype-based) than traditional c++/java/VB that professionals are used to

Except that's not really obvious when you're reading about the language -- it's got more traditional procedural syntax and structures. One doesn't tend to think of a language with a "while" loop as being functional.

Maybe one of the reasons "amateurs" don't use it the way you think they should is that the people who built the language have done a piss-poor job of conveying to peop

It's just that the barrier of entry is extremely low, so everyone can DIY its own script in notepad, while not understanding a single line of what they wrote. That's why we end up with so many poorly written javascript.

I love it's "hodge-podge" though... because that's what makes it so great to work with. It just feels like there are no limits when coding. I've always loved the C-Syntax languages, but I always felt confined working with them until I learned how to use Javascript.

They're both turing complete [wikipedia.org] languages. From a technical perspective, there's nothing Javascript can do that can't also be done in Basic.

Of course, Actionscript has some nice features that JS doesn't have-- like optional strong typing and automatic closure context. It's true they're both (mostly) syntactic sugar, but they're really nice to have when you need them and they don't get in the way the rest of the time.

It can't be type-safe, and it can't support real classes. You can't have two javascript 'classes' named the same thing without a collision. You can't have private variables, you can't have getter/setter functions.

ECMA chose to abandon ECMA4 because the majority of javascript developers were too... remedial... to understand such advanced concepts as 'classes'. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of VERY talented developers doing amazing things in Javascript, but their life would be made much easier if the

Q: How is Adobe going to react to HTML5?
A: I wouldn’t say reacting to HTML5. We see whatever people are using to express themselves. We’re going to make great tooling for HTML5. We’re going to make the best tools in the world for HTML 5.

It’s not about HTML 5 vs Flash. They’re mutually beneficial. The more important question is the freedom of choice on the web.

You could do jQuery in Actionscript, but I feel jQuery was mainly a workaround to working with the DOM. (jQuery has some nice additions for dealing with Arrays and Collections as well) AS never needed that since it always dealt with SVG and raw data, but the side features that come with jQuery I find missing when working with AS.

Their plugin will keep innovating and optimizing, and HTML will pick up the pieces that iOS users miss the most. Their plugin has a very LONG future ahead of it. In the time it's taken between HTML4 (1997) and HTML5(2014), Flash will have released 11 or 12 versions. (that's ALL of them)

Nah. They're just trying to make it so that developers do not have an either/or decision; they develop in flash and then crank out an auto-generated HTML5 version*. It's embrace and extend all over again.

* Of course, I am curious if, like Embrace and Extend, this will involve being 90% compatible, but always having a slight monkey-wrench so that people who don't go with the 800LB gorilla will always assume that the little guy is to blame when their standards-compliant implementation does not look as good as

?? They're not doing it to 'prove Jobs right', they're just doing what they think makes financial sense. What do they gain from 'standing their ground' (what does that mean - to financially keep supporting a technology of yesterday?), if it means they miss the boat on the market for authoring tools for HTML5, which IS going to be the biggest Web platform of the next decade? This isn't WWE or something, it's just business. Adobe can't stop Flash from dying, and it has little to do with Jobs, since Jobs didn'

People use that Adobe stuff to make their sites, because it is so widely spread. Now, if there is an alternative like HTML5, where you can do about the same without having to buy Adobe's expensive stuff, the sales of their Flash creation tools will decrease greatly.

What, exactly, about Flash do you think Adobe makes money on? It isn't the free Adobe flash player, but rather the tools to create content for the flash player. Adobe knows that HTML5 will be a mean competitor, so why wait while it gains momentum? If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. They'll still get lots of sales for their HTML5 compliant authoring tool that lets artists make cool, inaccessible, fancy things, rather than forcing companies to hire a JavaScript Guru to do the same thing.

Yes, exactly, which is why Adobe wants to move into the HTML5 territory. Remember, HTML5 is only a threat to Flash as a platform, not Flash as a development tool. Adobe has relied on Flash's ubiquity to sell their development platform for a while now. However, it is only a matter of time before there are more HTML5 compliant browsers out there than there are browsers with the Flash plugin. Since HTML5 offers a comparable feature set to Adobe Flash, the Platform, the only thing Adobe really has over HTML5 is

I would bet that they would gladly give up their flash player because they don't really sell it. If you think about it the world is doing Adobe a favor by providing a file format and viewers for the content created by it's tool sets, that it actually sells. They sell their creative tools, the flash player was always needed to provide a way to view these creations. Now that HTML5 can accomplish much of this they see a way out of the constant development on their player.

It's a mutually beneficial decision... Apple's decision to disallow Flash becomes a moot point, and Adobe gets an excuse to create another tool to sell. The end-users don't care what it's called so long as it works on all their devices.

Yeah and that is the down side to it all. They have to make their tools more attractive to developers, which they are working on. But it's a long row to hoe. They have a bad reputation and their tool set leaves a lot to be desired when compared to other "Rich Internet" tools.

This is like MS offering a converter for Windows applications to run on Linux. I'm fine with that, although I don't get what sense Adobe sees in that help to kill off one of their cash cows.

It won't kill of their cash cow. The point is that you would theoretically be able to code your site in Flash, then convert it to HTML5 to make an "iphone version" available. This would presumably help keep sites already heavily invested in Flash from outright jumping ship to HTML5.

It would make Flashplayer obsolete. That would lead to more and more site owners making their sites in HTML5 directly instead of doing it in Flash and then converting it. Which would be a fine thing for me.

So long as people are still using Flash to build their games and web applications, it doesn't really matter what they convert it into for the web. Flash is an excellent work environment for building things, and so far it is far from equalled in HTML 5 authoring tools. If Adobe can make Flash output to HTML 5 well then they have just conquered a new market and survived the fall of their old one.

There's nothing wrong with using Flash - except that it sucks and is expensive. Other competitors will step up and supply HTML authoring tools for the Web that don't suck as much and Adobe will have motivation to make their products better. Looks like Apple's iAd Producer is a step in that direction.

The question I ask myself is why isn't Adobe making a similar product already? Every couple of years I have to shell out another 1200 bucks or so to upgrade the Adobe suite and it never seems to get much better.

It doesn't support anything actually useful. There's a list of supported/unsupported features in the article. You can scroll down that list and easily find which features the company I work for uses to produce our Flash content. Those features are easy to find because they're all marked "unsupported".

Marginally useful for advertising and other non-interactive vector graphics, useless for anything with interactivity, video, or sound.

Because that's where all the consumers are. Sure, there are lots of users out there, but the metrosexuals with paychecks and spending money are all on their iPads, and they're still buying all sorts of shit. In the portable market, I would expect that two platforms are making the lion's share of purchases - Kindle and iPad. Throw in iPhone to that group if you want to include the smaller format market. Their devices are for consuming, and the only reason people spend time and money on websites to get peo

Translates buttons, gradients, frame sets and some animation - though it generates multiple.svg's for animation.This is for people who bought those (heinous) Flash templates for their restaurant/photo gallery/etc and are now horrified that the site doesn't play on iPad.As a long time Flash guy I enjoy telling most new clients they should go with javascript/css etc... No more discussing pretty (annoying) Flash splash openings. Nice dynamic AJAXee navigation. But for games it's actionscript all the way. Unt

In order to faithfully display the "new media format" a browser vendor will have to create a very compatible rendering engine.

WebKit is targetted, according to the article, but FireFox's Gecko will not be far behind. The obvious "last to support the standard" will be Microsoft and so I wonder how they will respond? Will there be an "HTML5 to Silverlight" converter? Will they pull in the WebKit rendering engine and when MSIE detects this form on HTML5 switch rendering engines? Whatever the case, failure

Although I like the idea of being able to convert Flash to HTML5, on many machines I *intentionally* block Flash because I do not want parts of normal websites having: animation, sound, movement, sucking down tons of bandwidth, CPU usage, battery use, etc.

I hope the browser designers will PLEASE give users some type of control to prevent/lower/stop animations. And before anyone mentions it: no, existing Firefox script-controlling addons (like No-Script) simply do not work for most people. They require way

That wasn't why we criticized Apple for refusing to support Flash, we criticized it because it was another instance of Apple telling their customers what they can do with their property. I think most of us support anything that makes Flash less viable.

And unfortunately, Adobe and Macromedia's efforts to make Flash too bloated to run on any existing system seems to have failed...

...it was another instance of Apple telling their customers what they can do with their property

Not at all. It was Apple trying to design the most robust mobile platform they could with decent battery life and allowing the consumer the choice as to whether they wanted to make the product their property.

Flash on Mac is a dog... the temps go way up causing the fans spin up noisily, and the browser actually stutters. You can almost feel it straining. Nothing else I run causes this behavior; it's immediate as soon as you wander over to a page using Flash (AutoCAD under DOSBox, XP under Parallels, OpenOffice / LibreOffice, Gimp, Thunderbird, iPhoto / iLife '09, iTunes, X11 etc -- as well as all kinds of other web content and other sites all work fine without the high temps or fans kicking in).